I:
I stopped for breath;
It was earthy, the soil
Was putrid to the touch:
Death oozed out of the cracks
Of the river, bubbling unnaturally.
Life was naught where I roamed.
Squeezing the last drops out of the bottle,
My cracked lips groaned, the silence strangled my memory
Only the weak were erased that day.
Four years ago I think
She ruled herself with a spring in her step
Before the sludge, the acid sludge
Wiped her dreams away
And ushered in the sun of winter
To never see summer again.

II:
Speckled with dust I carried onward;
The terrain flashed with familiarity
As I stepped into the darkness of her home
If you can even call it that anymore;
Her smile is a deep crimson, the blood of the many
Line her barren wasteland. Sometimes I face the winds
Instead of hiding; but they bring those hollow, pale spirits
Ever closer. They only stop
To torment; their whispers perfectly pierce
And destroy the hope I once had.

III:
They tell me sweet nothings and extend their hands of absence;
I cower in the darkness to stop their screams.
The scimitar of radiant light cuts through the night
As I prepare to face the wasteland again.

Swallows, sloes and willows; gone are the days where
They lined the earth and made it smell whole again.
Now we lay motionless in dreams long lost
Lonesome as I was, the ghosts haunt where I once were.

IIII:
The path in front of me winds endlessly;
Shattered and incomplete, it beckons me
To wherever it decides to take me.
For I am naught in the wasteland;
I will wait for her to come back
But the sands of time are not on my side.

Love and confusion confounding the illusion of trust in a systematic regime which they deny ever existed but constantly promise to improve upon. The hat's shape and color may change, but our inability to exchange their deranged platforms for a stabler form of expression exposes our disillusion with dispossession and our embracing being complacent in the face of our rulers' all-encompassing corruption.

My movements were eternally not my own
My distinctions, decisions, discrepancy,
Also not my own.
The creation or establishment of a newborn,
Covertly an awaiting infection of control and scare.
Because only a newborn had nothing to fear of this world or district.

I fear the air, the sun,
I cannot trust the outside,
I belong far from fear.  
How must I walk if it’s controlled?
Do I march or run?
Do I look up at the sky or close my eyes in terror?
Do I engulf the fear like a sharp knife or let it eat me up instead?
Not knowing will do both.

I’m writing here because it’s my own words,
Not a speech or sharing of my gospel.
It’s a sin to my kind,
But I am not like that kind.
Please allow my independence hidden,
I can't stand the scare.

In this place
The air is so dry that water sulks.
The sky is a viscous brown mosaic.
The sulfurous fumes of old suffering linger.

A woman stares as if trying to unsee creation.
Words on a man’s tongue sound
like rhythmic coughing.
At the only stoplight
the crosswalk sign flashes “Don’t waltz.”

Strangers recoil from me
as if from an embarrassing stain.

People stream to the town square
for some indecipherable ritual.
Probably a funeral for the sun
or a snake oil sale.

Welcome to humankind’s true garden.
Not paradise but a place of desolation,
and what comes after is not exile but striving
and getting the hell out.

So long, mom and dad.